Robert Burns

Burns’s first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), known as the Kilmarnock edition, contains 44 of Burns’s best known poems. The Edinburgh edition (1787) adds 22 poems, including “Address to the Unco Guid, or the Rigidly Righteous” and “The Brigs of Ayr.” The last version to be supervised by Burns, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1793), adds another 18, including “Tam o’ Shanter.”

James Johnson, Robert Burns, and Stephen Clarke, The Scots Musical Museum, 6 vol. (1787–1803), includes some 200 songs and fragments, with some airs, written, revised, or collected by Burns. More than 70 of Burns’s songs are included in the first five vol. of George Thomson (compiler), A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs for the Voice (1793–1818).

James Kinsley (ed.), The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vol. (1968), also available in an abridged ed., Poems and Songs (1969, reprinted 1979), is the standard modern scholarly edition. Donald A. Low (ed.), The Songs of Robert Burns (1993), contains the most complete edition of the songs with the music.

Feedback

Corrections? Updates? Help us improve this article!Contact our editors with your feedback.

(1759-96). Scotland’s greatest poet, Robert Burns, wrote in Scots, the English dialect of the country he loved so deeply. His songs and poems are emotionally intense and realistic, and they show a remarkable command of poetic form, especially for one with so little formal education. Burns’s work still arouses strong patriotic feeling in the Scottish people, and his humanity embraces the world, especially in poems like A Man’s a Man for a’ That.